OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Arguments to Key Points Mapping with Prompt-based Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Handling and digesting a huge amount of information in an efficient manner has been a long-term demand in modern society. Some solutions to map key points (short textual summaries capturing essential information and filtering redundancies) to a large number of arguments/opinions have been provided recently (Bar-Haim et al., 2020). To complement the full picture of the argument-to-keypoint mapping task, we mainly propose two approaches in this paper. The first approach is to incorporate prompt engineering for fine-tuning the pre-trained language models (PLMs). The second approach utilizes prompt-based learning in PLMs to generate intermediary texts, which are then combined with the original argument-keypoint pairs and fed as inputs to a classifier, thereby mapping them. Furthermore, we extend the experiments to cross/in-domain to conduct an in-depth analysis. In our evaluation, we find that i) using prompt engineering in a more direct way (Approach 1) can yield promising results and improve the performance; ii) Approach 2 performs considerably worse than Approach 1 due to the negation issue of the PLM.
An Exploration of Cross-Patch Collaborations via Patch Linkage in OpenStack
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Contemporary development projects benefit from code review as it improves the quality of a project. Large ecosystems of inter-dependent projects like OpenStack generate a large number of reviews, which poses new challenges for collaboration (improving patches, fixing defects). Review tools allow developers to link between patches, to indicate patch dependency, competing solutions, or provide broader context. We hypothesize that such patch linkage may also simulate cross-collaboration. With a case study of OpenStack, we take a first step to explore collaborations that occur after a patch linkage was posted between two patches (i.e., cross-patch collaboration). Our empirical results show that although patch linkage that requests collaboration is relatively less prevalent, the probability of collaboration is relatively higher. Interestingly, the results also show that collaborative contributions via patch linkage are non-trivial, i.e, contributions can affect the review outcome (such as voting) or even improve the patch (i.e., revising). This work opens up future directions to understand barriers and opportunities related to this new kind of collaboration, that assists with code review and development tasks in large ecosystems.
Summer: WeChat Neural Machine Translation Systems for the WMT22 Biomedical Translation Task
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper introduces WeChat's participation in WMT 2022 shared biomedical translation task on Chinese to English. Our systems are based on the Transformer, and use several different Transformer structures to improve the quality of translation. In our experiments, we employ data filtering, data generation, several variants of Transformer, fine-tuning and model ensemble. Our Chinese$\to$English system, named Summer, achieves the highest BLEU score among all submissions.
CLIP2GAN: Towards Bridging Text with the Latent Space of GANs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we are dedicated to text-guided image generation and propose a novel framework, i.e., CLIP2GAN, by leveraging CLIP model and StyleGAN. The key idea of our CLIP2GAN is to bridge the output feature embedding space of CLIP and the input latent space of StyleGAN, which is realized by introducing a mapping network. In the training stage, we encode an image with CLIP and map the output feature to a latent code, which is further used to reconstruct the image. In this way, the mapping network is optimized in a self-supervised learning way. In the inference stage, since CLIP can embed both image and text into a shared feature embedding space, we replace CLIP image encoder in the training architecture with CLIP text encoder, while keeping the following mapping network as well as StyleGAN model. As a result, we can flexibly input a text description to generate an image. Moreover, by simply adding mapped text features of an attribute to a mapped CLIP image feature, we can effectively edit the attribute to the image. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed CLIP2GAN compared to previous methods.
An adaptive shortest-solution guided decimation approach to sparse high-dimensional linear regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

High-dimensional linear regression model is the most popular statistical model for high-dimensional data, but it is quite a challenging task to achieve a sparse set of regression coefficients. In this paper, we propose a simple heuristic algorithm to construct sparse high-dimensional linear regression models, which is adapted from the shortest solution-guided decimation algorithm and is referred to as ASSD. This algorithm constructs the support of regression coefficients under the guidance of the least-squares solution of the recursively decimated linear equations, and it applies an early-stopping criterion and a second-stage thresholding procedure to refine this support. Our extensive numerical results demonstrate that ASSD outperforms LASSO, vector approximate message passing, and two other representative greedy algorithms in solution accuracy and robustness. ASSD is especially suitable for linear regression problems with highly correlated measurement matrices encountered in real-world applications.
Exploring Immersive Interpersonal Communication via AR
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

A central challenge of social computing research is to enable people to communicate expressively with each other remotely. Augmented reality has great promise for expressive communication since it enables communication beyond texts and photos and towards immersive experiences rendered in recipients' physical environments. Little research, however, has explored AR's potential for everyday interpersonal communication. In this work, we prototype an AR messaging system, ARwand, to understand people's behaviors and perceptions around communicating with friends via AR messaging. We present our findings under four themes observed from a user study with 24 participants, including the types of immersive messages people choose to send to each other, which factors contribute to a sense of immersiveness, and what concerns arise over this new form of messaging. We discuss important implications of our findings on the design of future immersive communication systems.
Robot Kinematics: Motion, Kinematics and Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This is a follow-up tutorial article of our previous article entitled "Robot Basics: Representation, Rotation and Velocity". For better understanding of the topics covered in this articles, we recommend the readers to first read our previous tutorial article on robot basics. Specifically, in this article, we will cover some more advanced topics on robot kinematics, including robot motion, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, and robot dynamics. For the topics, terminologies and notations introduced in the previous article, we will use them directly without re-introducing them again in this article. Also similar to the previous article, math and formulas will also be heavily used in this article as well (hope the readers are well prepared for the upcoming math bomb). After reading this article, readers should be able to have a deeper understanding about how robot motion, kinematics and dynamics. As to some more advanced topics about robot control, we will introduce them in the following tutorial articles for readers instead.
LoNe Sampler: Graph node embeddings by coordinated local neighborhood sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Local graph neighborhood sampling is a fundamental computational problem that is at the heart of algorithms for node representation learning. Several works have presented algorithms for learning discrete node embeddings where graph nodes are represented by discrete features such as attributes of neighborhood nodes. Discrete embeddings offer several advantages compared to continuous word2vec-like node embeddings: ease of computation, scalability, and interpretability. We present LoNe Sampler, a suite of algorithms for generating discrete node embeddings by Local Neighborhood Sampling, and address two shortcomings of previous work. First, our algorithms have rigorously understood theoretical properties. Second, we show how to generate approximate explicit vector maps that avoid the expensive computation of a Gram matrix for the training of a kernel model. Experiments on benchmark datasets confirm the theoretical findings and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed methods.
Semi-supervised binary classification with latent distance learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Binary classification (BC) is a practical task that is ubiquitous in real-world problems, such as distinguishing healthy and unhealthy objects in biomedical diagnostics and defective and non-defective products in manufacturing inspections. Nonetheless, fully annotated data are commonly required to effectively solve this problem, and their collection by domain experts is a tedious and expensive procedure. In contrast to BC, several significant semi-supervised learning techniques that heavily rely on stochastic data augmentation techniques have been devised for solving multi-class classification. In this study, we demonstrate that the stochastic data augmentation technique is less suitable for solving typical BC problems because it can omit crucial features that strictly distinguish between positive and negative samples. To address this issue, we propose a new learning representation to solve the BC problem using a few labels with a random k-pair cross-distance learning mechanism. First, by harnessing a few labeled samples, the encoder network learns the projection of positive and negative samples in angular spaces to maximize and minimize their inter-class and intra-class distances, respectively. Second, the classifier learns to discriminate between positive and negative samples using on-the-fly labels generated based on the angular space and labeled samples to solve BC tasks. Extensive experiments were conducted using four real-world publicly available BC datasets. With few labels and without any data augmentation techniques, the proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art semi-supervised and self-supervised learning methods. Moreover, with 10% labeling, our semi-supervised classifier could obtain competitive accuracy compared with a fully supervised setting.
When Private Blockchain Meets Deterministic Database
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

Private blockchain as a replicated transactional system shares many commonalities with distributed database. However, the intimacy between private blockchain and deterministic database has never been studied. In essence, private blockchain and deterministic database both ensure replica consistency by determinism. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis to uncover the connections between private blockchain and deterministic database. While private blockchains have started to pursue deterministic transaction executions recently, deterministic databases have already studied deterministic concurrency control protocols for almost a decade. This motivates us to propose Harmony, a novel deterministic concurrency control protocol designed for blockchain use. We use Harmony to build a new relational blockchain, namely HarmonyBC, which features low abort rates, hotspot resiliency, and inter-block parallelism, all of which are especially important to disk-oriented blockchain. Empirical results on Smallbank, YCSB, and TPC-C show that HarmonyBC offers 2.0x to 3.5x throughput better than the state-of-the-art private blockchains.
Distance Metric Learning Loss Functions in Few-Shot Scenarios of Supervised Language Models Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents an analysis regarding an influence of the Distance Metric Learning (DML) loss functions on the supervised fine-tuning of the language models for classification tasks. We experimented with known datasets from SentEval Transfer Tasks. Our experiments show that applying the DML loss function can increase performance on downstream classification tasks of RoBERTa-large models in few-shot scenarios. Models fine-tuned with the use of SoftTriple loss can achieve better results than models with a standard categorical cross-entropy loss function by about 2.89 percentage points from 0.04 to 13.48 percentage points depending on the training dataset. Additionally, we accomplished a comprehensive analysis with explainability techniques to assess the models' reliability and explain their results.
What's Behind the Mask: Estimating Uncertainty in Image-to-Image Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Estimating uncertainty in image-to-image networks is an important task, particularly as such networks are being increasingly deployed in the biological and medical imaging realms. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to this problem based on masking. Given an existing image-to-image network, our approach computes a mask such that the distance between the masked reconstructed image and the masked true image is guaranteed to be less than a specified threshold, with high probability. The mask thus identifies the more certain regions of the reconstructed image. Our approach is agnostic to the underlying image-to-image network, and only requires triples of the input (degraded), reconstructed and true images for training. Furthermore, our method is agnostic to the distance metric used. As a result, one can use $L_p$-style distances or perceptual distances like LPIPS, which contrasts with interval-based approaches to uncertainty. Our theoretical guarantees derive from a conformal calibration procedure. We evaluate our mask-based approach to uncertainty on image colorization, image completion, and super-resolution tasks, demonstrating high quality performance on each.
Progressive Learning without Forgetting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Learning from changing tasks and sequential experience without forgetting the obtained knowledge is a challenging problem for artificial neural networks. In this work, we focus on two challenging problems in the paradigm of Continual Learning (CL) without involving any old data: (i) the accumulation of catastrophic forgetting caused by the gradually fading knowledge space from which the model learns the previous knowledge; (ii) the uncontrolled tug-of-war dynamics to balance the stability and plasticity during the learning of new tasks. In order to tackle these problems, we present Progressive Learning without Forgetting (PLwF) and a credit assignment regime in the optimizer. PLwF densely introduces model functions from previous tasks to construct a knowledge space such that it contains the most reliable knowledge on each task and the distribution information of different tasks, while credit assignment controls the tug-of-war dynamics by removing gradient conflict through projection. Extensive ablative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of PLwF and credit assignment. In comparison with other CL methods, we report notably better results even without relying on any raw data.
Efficient Answer Enumeration in Description Logics with Functional Roles -- Extended Version
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

We study the enumeration of answers to ontology-mediated queries when the ontology is formulated in a description logic that supports functional roles and the query is a CQ. In particular, we show that enumeration is possible with linear preprocessing and constant delay when a certain extension of the CQ (pertaining to functional roles) is acyclic and free-connex acyclic. This holds both for complete answers and for partial answers. We provide matching lower bounds for the case where the query is self-join free.
Scientific and Creative Analogies in Pretrained Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper examines the encoding of analogy in large-scale pretrained language models, such as BERT and GPT-2. Existing analogy datasets typically focus on a limited set of analogical relations, with a high similarity of the two domains between which the analogy holds. As a more realistic setup, we introduce the Scientific and Creative Analogy dataset (SCAN), a novel analogy dataset containing systematic mappings of multiple attributes and relational structures across dissimilar domains. Using this dataset, we test the analogical reasoning capabilities of several widely-used pretrained language models (LMs). We find that state-of-the-art LMs achieve low performance on these complex analogy tasks, highlighting the challenges still posed by analogy understanding.
A Conflict-driven Interface between Symbolic Planning and Nonlinear Constraint Solving
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Robotic planning in real-world scenarios typically requires joint optimization of logic and continuous variables. A core challenge to combine the strengths of logic planners and continuous solvers is the design of an efficient interface that informs the logical search about continuous infeasibilities. In this paper we present a novel iterative algorithm that connects logic planning with nonlinear optimization through a bidirectional interface, achieved by the detection of minimal subsets of nonlinear constraints that are infeasible. The algorithm continuously builds a database of graphs that represent (in)feasible subsets of continuous variables and constraints, and encodes this knowledge in the logical description. As a foundation for this algorithm, we introduce Planning with Nonlinear Transition Constraints (PNTC), a novel planning formulation that clarifies the exact assumptions our algorithm requires and can be applied to model Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) efficiently. Our experimental results show that our framework significantly outperforms alternative optimization-based approaches for TAMP.
NeuralMPS: Non-Lambertian Multispectral Photometric Stereo via Spectral Reflectance Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Multispectral photometric stereo(MPS) aims at recovering the surface normal of a scene from a single-shot multispectral image captured under multispectral illuminations. Existing MPS methods adopt the Lambertian reflectance model to make the problem tractable, but it greatly limits their application to real-world surfaces. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network named NeuralMPS to solve the MPS problem under general non-Lambertian spectral reflectances. Specifically, we present a spectral reflectance decomposition(SRD) model to disentangle the spectral reflectance into geometric components and spectral components. With this decomposition, we show that the MPS problem for surfaces with a uniform material is equivalent to the conventional photometric stereo(CPS) with unknown light intensities. In this way, NeuralMPS reduces the difficulty of the non-Lambertian MPS problem by leveraging the well-studied non-Lambertian CPS methods. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Learning Integrable Dynamics with Action-Angle Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Machine learning has become increasingly popular for efficiently modelling the dynamics of complex physical systems, demonstrating a capability to learn effective models for dynamics which ignore redundant degrees of freedom. Learned simulators typically predict the evolution of the system in a step-by-step manner with numerical integration techniques. However, such models often suffer from instability over long roll-outs due to the accumulation of both estimation and integration error at each prediction step. Here, we propose an alternative construction for learned physical simulators that are inspired by the concept of action-angle coordinates from classical mechanics for describing integrable systems. We propose Action-Angle Networks, which learn a nonlinear transformation from input coordinates to the action-angle space, where evolution of the system is linear. Unlike traditional learned simulators, Action-Angle Networks do not employ any higher-order numerical integration methods, making them extremely efficient at modelling the dynamics of integrable physical systems.
Shielding in Resource-Constrained Goal POMDPs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) modeling an agent that needs a supply of a certain resource (e.g., electricity stored in batteries) to operate correctly. The resource is consumed by agent's actions and can be replenished only in certain states. The agent aims to minimize the expected cost of reaching some goal while preventing resource exhaustion, a problem we call \emph{resource-constrained goal optimization} (RSGO). We take a two-step approach to the RSGO problem. First, using formal methods techniques, we design an algorithm computing a \emph{shield} for a given scenario: a procedure that observes the agent and prevents it from using actions that might eventually lead to resource exhaustion. Second, we augment the POMCP heuristic search algorithm for POMDP planning with our shields to obtain an algorithm solving the RSGO problem. We implement our algorithm and present experiments showing its applicability to benchmarks from the literature.
A quantum algorithm to estimate the closeness to the Strict Avalanche criterion in Boolean functions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a quantum algorithm (in the form of a quantum oracle) that estimates the closeness of a given Boolean function to one that satisfies the ``strict avalanche criterion'' (SAC). This algorithm requires $n$ queries of the Boolean function oracle, where $n$ is the number of input variables, this is fewer than the queries required by the classical algorithm to perform the same task. We compare our approach with other quantum algorithms that may be used for estimating the closeness to SAC and it is shown our algorithm verifies SAC with the fewest possible calls to quantum oracle and requires the fewest samples for a given confidence bound.
Fuzziness, Indeterminacy and Soft Sets: Frontiers and Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

The present paper comes across the main steps that laid from Zadeh's fuzziness ana Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy sets to Smarandache's indeterminacy and to Molodstov's soft sets. Two hybrid methods for assessment and decision making respectively under fuzzy conditions are also presented through suitable examples that use soft sets and real intervals as tools. The decision making method improves an earlier method of Maji et al. Further, it is described how the concept of topological space, the most general category of mathematical spaces, can be extended to fuzzy structures and how to generalize the fundamental mathematical concepts of limit, continuity compactness and Hausdorff space within such kind of structures. In particular, fuzzy and soft topological spaces are defined and examples are given to illustrate these generalizations.